I picked up one of these:
http://www.fit-pc.com/fit-pc1/whats-new.html
for $200. It's running Ubuntu 8.04 with LXDE pretty reasonably and being an excellent Squeezebox Server. Peaks at 5W and is fanless, so it's virtually silent.
Previously I used an old laptop, but the fan whine drove me nuts and it was sucking 15-20W even at idle.
The 330Gb Hard drive cost me an extra $150 and it only works with parallel ATA, but worth a look.

Hmmm, so what do you think that new Apple tablet will be based on? ;)
The A9 has been available for a little while already (according to other comments here), and I see a sentence on their presentation "Hard macro already has it's first licensee".

Apple also uses ARM chips everywhere (iPhone) and so is really familiar with getting OSX to work on it...

(health warning: totally uninformed random guess.)

Please mod above up. If people here understood the difference between a utility patent and a design patent, we could avoid troll articles and the inevitable "EVIL!" "NOT EVIL!" debate.

"That spokesperson must not have seriously studied ms' history, or is too enamored with the company to be honest about it."
You seem to have some serious misconceptions about what a "Spokesperson" role is...

Maybe he's requesting a dupe?

The Freescape engine from 1987 was the first time I came across the explicit concept of a 3D game engine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driller_(game)
They even advertised it on the packaging!

thanks for that: what you say sounds believable, but a little spooky. The way you frame it Google's strategy is primarily about weakening competitors (specifically Microsoft). Where does this strategy end? Who does Google intend to target after Microsoft? What is the actual value of this?

What you're describing sounds like a corporate sociopath...

"Apple may have the edge in ease of use, but they never had an edge in anything else"

If you took apart two phones and compared how they were designed, you'd see Apple's mechanical design is more considerably more advanced, some could say unnecessarily complex. Their manufacturing sophistication is a pretty sizable leap ahead of any other company making consumer products, bar none.

You simply can't make an iPhone using plastic molded parts and paint. It just can't be done.

I just choked on my sandwich. I can't let that go unchallenged:
I have been suffering from Ribbons since they came out - I'm a reasonably heavy user of Office and came at this with a pretty open mind. I gave it a few months to 'settle in' and I pretty much expected to like it.

IMO it is an abysmal interface.

The most obvious failing (to me) is that you work in different applications in different ways. In Word, I do tend to type, then format, then print. Ribbons might work. In Powerpoint, I work in a totally different way, completing and formatting each slide as I go, meaning I have to hunt endlessly around ribbons to find Grid Settings (WHERE!), Send Backwards (etc, etc...) The only solution I've found is to create a mini menu on the tiny customizable toolbar.

Why would it be such a crime to let me customize menus? Or even tear off the ones I'm using a lot?

The Register has a decent analysis of this making similar points:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/subs_crash/
Lewis Page consistently seems to write insightfully about nuclear submarines - I look forward to seeing how well he can rant about Wikipedia.

It did, but I decided to go look for it in Word 2007 and found one of the dangers of allowing user-generated content. Turns out MS doesn't really get sarcasm:

1.Open Word 2007 (though it's the same in any Office 2007 app, I think). Click on the help icon in the top right (?)

2.Type in "Office Assistant"

3. 7th link down is "What happened to Office Assistant?" Click here.

4. Read the *first* community tip for some mean-spirited hilarity.

"And given the the amazingness(I know it's not a real word) that is Vista, you (Microsoft) could even creat an overall Vista Mascot that could hang out on our desktop, even while no MS Office programs are open."

Kudos to the submitter.